Extra: Since 1907, members have cherished time at Illinois Valley Yacht and Canoe Club

Wednesday

Aug 20, 2014 at 5:00 PM

Leslie Renken of the Journal Star

The Illinois Valley Yacht and Canoe Club’s history is intertwined with the history of its members.

Organized in 1907, the club has been a social center for multiple generations of several families.

Jack Wilkins was about 17 when his father joined the club.

“He got the membership because of my interest in boating,” said Wilkins, 82, after lunching with a group of long-time members in the club recently. Wilkins had just purchased a 16-foot wood boat with a 50 horse-power World War II-era Invasion out-board motor.

“It was a junker,” said Wilkins. “It didn’t take much money to buy.” He paid for it with money earned from his Journal Star newspaper route.

The boat, which Wilkins soon discarded for a better one, was the beginning of a love affair with boating and the Illinois River that would last a lifetime. He passed the interest on to his son, Doug.

“I was 3 years old when he bought me my first sailboat,” said Doug Wilkins. “He bought me a pram, which is basically a bathtub with a sail on it.” Doug Wilkins has fond memories of learning to sail while perched in his father’s lap.

“I was 5 or 6 when I was able to take the boat out on my own,” he said. During summer vacations Doug Wilkins and his friends spent the day at the IVY Club, exploring the river in their tiny sail boats.

“It was just a great time of life,” he said. “You could go do what you wanted to without the fear of getting in trouble. We would be dropped off at 8 a.m. There was the snack bar and the pool. You felt like you were a little adult.”

Doug Wilkins, 53, continued the tradition with his children.

“I dropped my kids off here and they did pretty much the same thing,” he said.

Club history

The IVY Club was born just as the gasoline engine was becoming affordable to people of modest means. Boating has always been popular in Peoria, starting with the native people who populated the area for thousands of years before European settlers arrived.

In the late 1800s, sailing and rowing were spectator sports. Hundreds of fans lined the river banks to watch competitions held on Peoria Lake.

According to “One Hundred Years on the Illinois River,” a history book written in 2007 by IVY Club members to celebrate the club’s 100th anniversary, Peoria was nationally known for its oarsmen. Their regattas were reported in newspapers around the country.

“The Illinois River, because it is so wide, had really huge canoe races — five or six abreast. Those are big boats, with six- or seven-man teams,” said Jim Johnston, IVY Club’s historian. “They couldn’t do that at Harvard. They would come from the East Coast for some of these races. It was a really big deal.”

When the powerboat came along, Peoria became noted for that kind of racing as well.

“In the 1920s they built grandstands at the foot of Main Street,” said Johnston. “The boats could go 50 or 60 mph — at that time that was flying. It was a awful lot of fun for people.”

In 1914 the IVY Club invited members of the Peoria Canoe Club to join them after their clubhouse was destroyed by fire. That was when “canoe” was added to the IVY Club’s name — to this day the club’s official name is the Illinois Valley Yacht and Canoe Club.

The IVY Club’s first clubhouse, purchased shortly after their first meeting, was a houseboat named the Mary Jane. For the first month of the club’s existence she was parked at the foot of Fayette Street until the city of Peoria complained. Club members moved the boat upriver in May 1907.

Later that year club members began talking about building a clubhouse on dry land. Property was purchased and a clubhouse was built in 1908 for a total cost of $4,065. In 1927 the club bought more land and built a single-story brick foundation 700 feet north of the old location. The original building was transferred to the new foundation. Though the clubhouse has been expanded and updated over the years, the original structure is still standing in the complex.

Over the years many improvements have been made to club property. In the early 1930s, the IVY Club installed a marine railway, making it then the only place on the Illinois River where large boats could be hauled out of the water for repair. In 1938 the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers announced plans to install a lock and dam below Peoria, prompting the club to construct a 300-foot seawall to protect its shoreline. And in 1947 came the ultimate improvement — a protected harbor.

Though many people were involved in the project, three men are noted in particular — Harold Vonachen, J. Fletcher Lankton and Congressman Everett McKinley Dirksen. Breakwaters were built with $24,936 in federal funds and close to $40,000 raised by the IVY Club. Since that time the IVY Club has been an official Harbor of Refuge — they are required to help boats in distress.

Because the clubhouse is situated along the river, flooding can be a problem. In 1943 the Illinois River came into the clubhouse when it reached recorded high of 28.8 feet. That record was broken during the flood of 2013 which crested almost 6 inches higher.

“It wiped out the inside of the Club,” said Johnston. The damage was repaired with an eye toward future flooding. Walls below the flood line were replaced with water-proof concrete block and electrical plugs were raised.

The current project at the IVY Club is to improve and expand the harbor.

“We didn’t have enough large boat slips, and we were having dredging issues,” said Johnston. The club has also replaced breakwater barges with concrete fill that goes down to the riverbed to better protect boats in the harbor from damaging wake.

Though sedimentation of the Illinois River seems to have slowed in recent years, club members still believe it is a threat. According to “One Hundred Years on the Illinois River” the river was 8 feet deep in the early 1900s — by 2007 it averaged only 2-feet outside of the channel.

“I bought my boat in 1975 and that year we took it down to the riverfront for the Fourth of July for the fireworks,” said Allen Andrew, 83. “We parked a little upriver from the old Cilco building. Ten years later that was solid ground, and now there are trees 6 to 8 inches in diameter growing there.”

Harbor for the adventurous

The IVY Club’s window-filled bar is decorated with the club’s collection of multicolored burgees, the little flags boating clubs fly to identify themselves. When an Ivy Club member meets a member of another club, they exchange burgees. The collection contains flags from around the globe.

“That’s one of the things about people who belong to this club — they’ve gone all over the world and have had interesting experiences,” said Carolyn Coulter, a long-time member who is on the IVY Club board. “We have members who have been to Australia, Brazil, Hong Kong, Japan, Switzerland, Canada, Chile, Argentina, Canada and Singapore.”

Not everyone who belongs to the IVY Club owns a boat. Johnston estimates that about one third of the membership joined for social reasons.

“We normally have about 18 parties a year, and each one has a different bent to it,” he said. “Next week is the Mexican party. We have Halloween parties and we used to have a pirate party.”

While Coulter owns a sail boat, the social aspect of the club is more a part of her daily life than the boat. She socializes often at the club, including biweekly lunches with friends.

“We stay for an hour or two and solve all the world’s problems,” she said.

Coulter considers the IVY Club a second home. A few years ago a health issue forced her to leave her job as a neurosurgical trauma nurse. While contemplating the related financial issues, Coulter knew one thing for sure:

“I told people that I’d go without food before I’d give up my membership to the IVY Club, and I meant it.”

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Be sure to check out Sunday's Journal Star for our Extra edition celebrating 100-year-old businesses in the Peoria area and look for daily posts here: http://www.pjstar.com/extra.

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Leslie Renken can be reached at 686-3250 or lrenken@pjstar.com. Follow her on Twitter, @LeslieRenken, and subscribe to her on Facebook.com/leslie.renken.